What is SEO – and why it matters for your health, wellbeing or fitness business

June 21, 2017

If you haven’t already heard of the term ‘SEO’, it may sound like some strange alien invasion or bodily infection – however, you’ll be pleased to learn (I hope!) that it is neither. Instead, this three-letter acronym stands for ‘search engine optimisation’. In a nutshell, it is the process of ensuring your website is visible on search engines, and helps to drive free and organic traffic towards your website.

SEO is the process of ensuring your website is visible on search engines, and helps to drive free and organic traffic towards your website.

As you will know from your own experiences, no one has the time, energy or inclination to browse dozens of search results pages. Often you’ll just select the first one or two that pop-up. As such, it is imperative for businesses to rank high in the listings in order to be found quickly and easily. This is the greatest way to maximise your chances of online success.

Google uses various methods in order to choose how it ranks pages in its search results, but essentially they push great content that is relevant to the search phrase to the top. They seek to pick out the most interesting, authoritative and appropriate results. Therefore, in order to get your site seen, one of the crucial things it needs to do is be all of those five factors. If you set yourself out as being an ‘authority’ for a particular area, Google will eventually pick up on this through their quality control processes and reward you for it.

There are three very simple things you can do to help boost your SEO:

High-quality content

Firstly, fill your website with high-quality content. This can often be done through having a blog, in which you can write lots of relevant content for your audience to read. This content could be about your product or service, but could also include industry news or events that you think your audience would care about. Additional content can be added to your site through product listings with detailed descriptions, FAQ pages with informative responses, and a comprehensive home page.

It doesn’t mean your site should be swamped with text though – no one has time to read all of that. It’s about being clever with the text that you are including. Blogs should be at least 300 words or more. Between 500 and 700 words is usually a good, readable length.

It is also important to optimise your text with keywords and phrases that people may be using when searching. Depending on your business, this could run on the lines of: ’boutique fitness centre’, ‘luxury workouts’, ‘professional service’, ‘personal trainers’, and so forth. Often there will be a variation of words and phrases that are suited to your business. That all being said – you should always be writing for your reader, not a search engine. Don’t sacrifice great quality content to force in loads of keywords. It should feel authentic and natural.

You should always be writing for your reader, not a search engine. Don’t sacrifice great quality content to force in loads of keywords.

These key words shouldn’t only feature in your content though, and you should also look to add them in to your page titles, headlines, meta descriptions, alt tags, image descriptions, excerpts, and tags. Adding the Yoast SEO plug-in to your website can help you quickly measure how well each page is doing for SEO, and allows you to specify a focus keyword. It also tells you how ‘readable’ your page is.

Links

Secondly, it’s important to add internal and external links to your web pages. This helps Google identify your pages as being authoritative sources. Links are also vital for your rankings in terms of other people linking to your website, as this shows you are being seen by other platforms as a reputable website. You need to make it easy and straightforward for people to share your site, as well as producing content that other people would naturally want to link to. If the content is poor, people simply won’t link to it. If it’s useful and interesting, they will.

You need to make it easy and straightforward for people to share to your site, as well as producing content that other people would actually naturally want to link to.

Regular updates

Thirdly, update your content regularly. Google is constantly updating where pages sit in its rankings, so just because you might find yourself high up at one point, it doesn’t mean you will stay there. You need to constantly stay on your A-game. This will help the search engine’s continue to find your website relevant and useful, and will increase your chances of getting those coveted top spots.

It’s also worth noting that every search engine will have its own way of ranking you, so this is another reason to stay on the ball. Even if one is showing you favourably, it doesn’t mean another competitor site will – therefore, you need to keep analysing your website, looking for improvements, and finding ways to develop and grow your SEO. There’s no time for sitting on your laurels.